Tag Archives: facebook

As part of my Whimsday series of posts I will occasionally post an idea that I’ve had that I have no time or skill to successfully complete. I hope maybe you will, it will be wildly successful, and you’ll decide to thank me with a car or something.

Where is the App for 25 Random Things? What has no one thrown something together yet? This thing has gone viral on several social networks and if you put together an app that let you list and change your items, send out invites, LINK when your friends install and fill out their 25 random things, and then send out feed notices when someone changes their items – it seems like you would have an easy winner!

I’ve never tried my hand at developing for Facebook but hopefully their are enough features that you could put something together that is snazzier that the ‘notes’ that are currently being used, so somebody get to work on this! I’ll be awaiting the delivery of my Prowler or failing that a nice hybrid sometime in the next couple of months :-p

Since participating in RSS Awareness Day I have found myself much more aware of the lack of RSS! There are so many things that are pushed to me by e-mail that I would rather have the option of pulling by RSS reader. I know both technologies have a push and a pull aspect but the bevy of e-mail notification tools make e-mail the pushier option of the two. I’m not after a mass switch here but options, give me more options! Anything on the web that can change should have an RSS feed available.

Here are some advances I would like to see:

Social Networks – RSS is starting to show up more, but what these networks need are the options to filter by each item that can be updated and to create multiple feeds. For example if you are on Facebook you should be able to subscribe to an RSS feed(s) that you set up from your newsfeed. You might want one feed for everything and I might want everything in one feed except to peel off status updates to second feed.

A widely implemented SRSS (Secure RSS) – Feeds of from your bank, credit card companies, and investment firms are among a few useful places for Secure RSS feeds, there are any number of other uses including private corporate feeds. If there is one single item needed to push RSS more to the mainstream, this is it.

Advertisements – The ability to mass ignore posts in RSS also makes it the perfect vehicle for the spammy type e-mail services you may tolerate. I like to see what Dell has for sale and the current prices on all the random computer gear at the new CompUSA.com, but I delete those e-mails unread for the most part, it would be much better to scan them and trash them in bulk in an RSS feed.

DRSS (Dynamic RSS) – I don’t know if this is a coined phase or not, but this is a feature that’s just starting to pop up and that I hope to see a lot more of, an RSS feed that builds itself from a site’s content and your interests. I currently get an e-mail from Bankrate.com when they write about 529 college savings plans, make this an RSS feed for me instead! Call it filtering or call it search, either way you’re making the feed dynamic for my interests. With RSS bloat and purges this type of focused RSS will keep me reading and less frustrated.